Andrea Zanzotto: The Language of Beauty's Apprentice

By Beverly C. Allen

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520330689

Beverly C. Allen

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ANDREA ZANZOTTO

ANDREA ZANZOTTO

The Language of Beauty’s Apprentice

BEVERLY ALLEN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1988 by The Regents of the University of California

Originally published in Italian in a modified version as Verso la beltà: Gli esordi poetici di Andrea Zanzotto (Venice: Corbo e Fiore Editore, 1987).

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Alien, Beverly

Andrea Zanzotto: the language of beauty’s apprentice / Beverly Allen.

p. cm.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-520-05860-7 (alk. paper)

1. Zanzotto, Andrea, 1921- —-Criticism and interpretation.

I. Title.

PQ4851. A74Z54 1988 851’.914—dcl9 87-18462 Printed in the United States of America 123456789 for Ben

Contents 1

Contents 1

Introduction

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry stands out both in Italy and internationally for its rigorous intellect and its stylistic invention. This book is an introduction to that poetry based on the notion that the difficulties encountered when reading Zanzotto’s well-known later works are eased by a careful look at his early books. In these, we find the groundwork for what comes after 1968, the year his work leapt into the limelight with the publication of La beltà [beauty]. What we see more easily in the first books than in the later ones, and what this book traces is, quite simply, a story. It is a story simultaneously of its own telling and of its teller. As such, it serves as more than an introduction to something else. It is also a parable of the possibilities of language and the self in our time.

Modern and contemporary questions regarding the constitution of the self elicit numerous ideologically determined answers. While Zanzotto’s response (like that of his late friend, Pier Paolo Pasolini) skirts any particular ideology, we might think of it as a kind of linguistic materialism. As his early books make vividly clear, language for Zanzotto always circumscribes any communicable notion of the self. Paradoxically, when it is poetry, language also acts as witness for what cannot be said. In the world of perception that Zanzotto’s early poetry reveals, the self we meet knows he is more than his linguistic ontology and struggles mightily with the terrible frustration this causes him. Then he rejects despair by accepting the apparent—and hence materially actual—linguistic determination of subjectivity because it affords him communicative possibilities.

In an age in which critical thought has often been aimed at discerning the erotic phenomenology that might demystify ideology (to use Paolo Valesio’s words),¹ in which literary theory has tended to sidestep questions of value as it reveals patterns of desire, Zanzotto’s insistence on language as a bottom line in the calculation of subjectivity is the basis of what I am calling his linguistic materialism. Further, his critique of individual identity as being apparently singular and unified but actually essentially dependent on a collective context (where other members of the group include not only other people but also language itself) attributes moral and ethical value to this materialist base. For Zanzotto, communication is more than the dynamic that allows for a notion of reciprocal subjectivity; it is also the dynamic from which all value is derived.

We should keep in mind that Zanzotto’s work corresponds to a time of profound crises in Italy—the postwar years, corruption in the government and the Vatican, the Historical Compromise, and terrorism. Such Zanzottan themes as the linguistic determination of communicable and communicative subjectivity, the unconscious selectivity of memory, and the necessity for an ecological reading of history have vast social significance even though few of his poems are thematically political. Such themes testify to a consciousness of the communal that undermines and challenges the potentially oppressive authority of any discourse—even, of course, its own.

THE LATER WORKS: La Beltà

Since the present study covers Zanzotto’s poetry prior to La beltà, we will begin with a brief description of that book whose appearance in 1968 was a provocative agglomeration of unlikely thematic bedfellows. Its very title evokes the nineteenth-century Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi, whose own linguistic theory divided words into two categories: parole and termini.² Parole, or words, are those lexical entities which, by their archaism or poetic associations or some other self-referential differentiating device, manage not only to communicate their signifieds but also to suggest ineluctable resonances—referents, say, that can only be connoted. These words in Leopardi have aesthetic and affective charges; they are powerful indicators of language’s paradoxical ability to suggest meanings that somehow escape the very circumscription of language itself. A prime example of Leopardi’s words is beltà, the archaic, Latinate, and truncated version of the standard Italian word for beauty, bellezza. Bellezza, in turn, exemplifies Leopardi’s termini or terms, lexical units that correspond to their denotive signifieds but suggest nothing more. For Leopardi termini are the dead ends of linguistic signification, and he holds most lexical units to be of this nature.

Zanzotto’s 1968 title thus evokes the presence of Italian poetic tradition and, more specifically, the shadow of one of his own preferred poets, Leopardi. Under this shadow, La beltà presents a varied cast of characters—including Mao-Tse-Tung, Jacques Lacan, Nino (a peasant-poet and friend of Zanzotto from his own town of Pieve di Soligo), and the vampire encountered earlier in Vocativo [Vocative].

Peasant prophecies are juxtaposed with pseudo-tse-bao aphorisms that in turn encounter Lacan’s mirror stage in a kind of contest for discursive stage-center.

These characters act out variant versions of linguistic arbitrariness. In each poem’s scenario, multiple possibilities of meaning risk their own reduction and the consequent annihilation of existential and perceptual alternatives. Notions directly related to linguistic discourse appear as well: petél (dialect baby talk), the lingoes of medical chemistry and psychoanalysis, and Latin, for example. Each is marginalized by the Italian, and each represents possibilities of existence and perception which are absent from the standardized language.

Modes or tonalities of the Beltà poems pass from outrange/outrage to memory to prophecy, and the book’s intense connection with its social context is evident in the—at times explicit, at times implicit— commentary these modes make on the Italian social and political realities of the sixties. These modes are present throughout Zanzotto’s work and form integral parts of his polemic with an authoritative, power-serving discourse of history whenever they occur.

The metaphor of snow is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Zanzotto’s Beltà. From Dietro il paesaggio [Behind the landscape], his first book, on, the specific landscape of his hometown, Pieve di So- ligo, and the neighboring regions (the pre-Alpine mountains of the Veneto, the Montello wood, the parish villages, each with its own dialect) serves as an omnipresent metaphor for complex issues of subjective ontology and linguistic arbitrariness and determinacy. With La beltà, however, even the reader who is used to previous Zanzottan landscapes may initially be blinded by a constant sense of the shimmering whiteness of snow. Coming just after the blue with which his previous book, IX Ecloghe [IX eclogues] ends, this metaphor of temporary stasis and vast promise of renewal, of possibilities of meaning (that is, if one has been following the story in the earlier books), breaks into view with renewed force.

And the force is not simply that of the metaphor. Zanzotto’s second Beltà poem, La perfezione della neve, is also a coming-to-light of the style that had germinated in the previous books. It begins:

Quante perfezioni, quante quante totalità. Pungendo aggiunge.

E poi astrazioni astrificazioni formulazione d’astri assideramento, attraverso sidera e coelos 5 assideramenti assimilazioni— nel perfezionato procederei

più in là del grande abbaglio, del pieno e del vuoto, ricercherei procedimenti risaltando, evitando

10 dubbiose tenebrose; saprei direi.³

e

[How many perfections, how many how many totalities. It adds by stinging.

And then abstractions astrifications asteroid formations starring frostbite, across sidera and coelos 5 starring frostbites assimilations— in the perfected I would proceed

further beyond the great yawn, beyond the full and the empty,

I would seek for procedures by jumping over, by avoiding

10 things dubious things shadowy; I would know I would

isay.]

This is an example of the sweet, smart style that catapulted Zanzotto’s work to fame in the fateful year of 1968. In a book whose titular banner is an archaic sort of beauty and whose goal is to push perception beyond the limits of language, subject and context or eye and sky are among the objects recognized (ricognizioni del fundus oculi del fundus coelorum [recognitions of the fundus oculi of the fundus coelorum]), as is the horror hidden in the present (Napalm dietro il paesaggio [Napalm behind the landscape]).⁴ La beltà is Zanzotto’s clearest statement of the geometrical correspondence between the personal and the political that informs all his work.

GLI SGUARDI I FATTI E SENHAL [Glances, Facts and Senhals]

La beltà is followed by two short books. The first of these is a single, long poem published in 1969 and occasioned by the Apollo 2 lunar landing on July 20 of that year. In Zanzotto’s early volumes, the sky is a metaphor for the undefineable source of meaning. In Gli sguardi, i fatti e senhal, the technological invasion of space (and, hence, the source of meaning) is treated via a Rorschach dynamic of perception and projection as a grave violence done to Diana, moon goddess and huntress, who speaks here of her own wounds. Thematically, this poem continues a story begun in the Polyphemus poem of the IX Ecloghe, where a satellite launching serves as the occasion for another poetic conversation, with the Odyssey as a sub-text. Here, however, the literary atmosphere is more varied. Erostratus, Petrarch, Longinus, and Parini appear in a context that also includes the wild child, the psychoanalytic notion of foreclosure, the Eastern philosophical principle of yin and yang, and the techno-perceptive registering of decibels.

But of all the voices that speak in Gli sguardi only Diana’s appears in quotation marks; only the voice of the goddess can claim reportable veracity, as if she had actually spoken these very words, and they had been heard, not invented, by the scribe who makes them available to us. This is an important moment in Zanzotto’s vast ecology discourse: the goddess Diana tells the poet that she herself has been a wound in what otherwise would have been an unsullied body of beauty. Yet this natural wound that here characterizes meaning differs from the wound technology has inflicted upon meaning, as we discern in this fragment of the poet-Diana dialogue set within the multi-voice conversation which is the poem itself:

—Ho saputo del tuo ferimento ma tu ne sarai ne sarai ne sarai complice abbastanza? Ammetti che sei 70 che sei che sei tu stessa una qualche una qualche forma di e di e di e di // inflitta // nelle cose i fatti le visioni, di di punta —"Ero il trauma in questo immenso corpo di bellezza corpo di bellezza £ la selva in profumo d’autunno 75 in perdizione d’autunno

in lieve niveo declivio niveo non piu renitenza stelle bacche stille in cori viola e rosso sul lago di neve"⁵

e

[—I knew about your wounding but are you really are

tyou really

are you really its accomplice enough? Admit that you

iare

70 that you are that you are yourself some kind of some

ikind of

form of and of and of and of // inflicted // within things facts visions, say it straight —"I was the trauma in this immense body of beauty the forest is a body of beauty in autumn’s perfume 75 in autumn’s perdition

in soft snowy slope snowy no longer reluctant stars berries droplets in choruses violet and red on the lake of snow"]

Zanzotto’s poetry in the eventful years of 1968 and 1969 show, then, two versions of problems of subjectivity and meaning, the first in a contemporary political context, the second in a contemporary technological one.

A CHE VALSE? [What was the point?]

In 1970, Zanzotto published a collection of poems he had written from 1938 to 1942, some of them contemporary with others he had selected to publish in his first book, Dietro il paesaggio. After the Beltà discur- sions on possibilities of meaning and the Sguardi dramatization of such problematics at their source, the hearkening back to his own earliest work has a mimetic quality to it. Not surprisingly, A che valse? bears many similarities to Zanzotto’s other early work; its uniqueness lies in its relative stylistic simplicity. Simultaneously, these early poems are the strongest testimony in all of Zanzotto’s opus to his kinship with the so-called hermetic poets, especially Ungaretti and Montale, a kinship many critics consider an integral element of Zanzotto’s work in general. For example, Per vuoti monti e strade come corde [Along empty mountains and cord-like roads] contains these lines:

Ho perduto il sole nella mia bocca e nel mio cuore,

il mio desiderio è un segno 20 di sangue sulla neve.⁶

e

[I have lost the sun in my mouth and in my heart, my desire is a sign 20 of blood on the snow.]

Just as representative of these early poems published out of order in 1970, when Zanzotto’s current concerns include the possibilities of meaning in contemporary contexts, is the initial line group from the book’s titular poem:

A che valse l’attesa del gioco?

I compagni mancavano

o distratti seguivano dall'alto

il volo oscuro dei pianeti.

5 La notte circola ormai

consuma il settentrione ma non la tua presenza vasta come il candore di stanze senza tramonto.⁷

e

[What was the point of waiting for the game?

Your playmates were missing or, distracted, were following the planets’ dark flight from on high.

5 By now night circulates

consumes the north but not your presence vast as the candor of sunsetless rooms.]

It is helpful to keep this particular book in mind while reading the early work discussed here with which its composition is contemporary. While the author’s decision to delay publication of the A che valse? poems removes them somewhat from the context of his first four published books (and hence from the present study), it also serves those books as a retrospective gloss.

PASQUE [Easters]

In 1973, Zanzotto’s most Lacanian book came out. The irony of the title lies in its plurality: if more than one Easter exists, then the holiday itself changes meaning. A multiplicity of easters or of meaning- producing absences is, in fact, one of the book’s main themes. The other is pedagogy, but a pedagogy that extends beyond the classroom or the Reading Center (the title of the book’s first poem) to encompass the tactics of Orpheus and Pygmalion. Pedagogy is seduction, therefore, in a chronology of celebrations that duplicate themselves and meaning.

Pasque is Lacanian to the extent that it makes a theme of the way desire undermines subjectivity (what Lacan calls the subversion of the subject) as well as the knowledge-seeking aspects of desire itself (what Lacan, calling on Hegel, terms the dialectic of desire).⁸ Easters are like the signifiers, the subjects, if you will, which, though devoid of content (meaning) in themselves, act like empty Easter tombs to determine the relationships between all the things that surround them. And the search for knowledge of the other involves a pedagogy not devoid of seduction.

But to insist on Zanzotto’s Lacanianism is to do the Italian poet a disservice. Many notions we tend to associate primarily with the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan are discernible first in Zanzotto’s poetry. They can be found, for example, in the ways poetry investigates subjectivity and desire in Zanzotto’s first books. An early reader of Lacan, Zanzotto found in the French analyst notions in many ways parallel to his own. Pasque may, in fact, be read as a kind of epiphany of the Zanzotto-Lacan dialogue that had been going on for years before American readers took to Lacan.

There are two major easters in Pasque: one in the poem, La pasqua a Pieve di Soligo [Easter in Pieve di Soligo], and the other in Pasqua di maggio [Easter in May], a calendrical impossibility. Both long poems are about meaning and its vicissitudes. The Pieve di Soligo Easter is a homage to Blaise Cendrars’ Pâques à New York. Written in alexandrians and rima baciata (another Easter reference if one thinks of Judas), the village Easter is a conversation between voices distinguished from one another by the Hebrew letters which are used to mark the verses of the Lamentations of Jeremiah in Easter- time prayers. These letters signal an acrostic which, occurring outside its original context, has lost its initial meaning yet nonetheless still names the voices as they speak.

After a voice called HETH has evoked the shades of such martyrs as Bruno, Vanini, and Hus, another called TET responds with what we might offer here as a window-synopsis of the meaning theme:

TET Ma il reale e il fantasmatico, l’autre e l’owio

timpallidisce e vira

di fosfeni il perverso e la regola il sempre e il mai

iscema;

lo spazio, il rastremato e sconfinato spazio di un

ideficit créa

120 l’alibi in cui questa maramaglia e frattaglia di idee

Lsi bea:

oh ricupero in suicidio, coagulamento nell'atto-uno,

Linfine.

E invece rievocazione—doping per interposta persona,

esalazione di cine.

Forse l’apparato è pronto, là sul colle famoso, la flebo col trucco, goccia a goccia nel cotto nel solfo, flebo

Ldi , placebo,

e io dall'alto del come-suicidio sul colle famoso guardo

lin tondo

e m'istituisco goccia a goccia in leader feroce del (mio)

imondo.

Per questo, oggi, o maghi delle arti, dall'umana figura nonostante i vostri editti ho tolto la censura,

per questo a ogni dichiarato spifferato spampanato

Ldiscorso

130 nonostante voi, angeli del magistero, ho tolto il morso:

è roba che mai non spurga dal suo-sé e si riconvoglia

i.nel fondo

dove sbarrato sta il significante che è leader feroce del

immondo.⁹

e

[TET But the real and the phantasmatic, the autre

Land the evident pale and spiral, the painting and my corporeal schema are crawling

iwith phosphenes, the perverse and the rule the always and the never

(diminish in phosphenes; space, the raked-over and limitless space of a deficit

Lcreates

120 the alibi this rabble and jabble of ideas delights in: oh recuperation in suicide, coagulament in the first

i.act, finally.

And instead re-evocation-doping through a person

Linterposed, cinema exhalation.

Perhaps the apparatus is ready, there on the famous

Lhill, the phlebus with make-up, drop by drop in the brick in the

tsulphur, phlebus of , placebo, and I from the height of the as-if-suicide upon the

¡.famous hill look around and institute myself drop by drop as ferocious leader

tof (my) world.

For this, today, oh magi of the arts, I have withdrawn censorship of the human figure in spite of your edicts,

for this I have withdrawn the muzzle from every

idedared

130 whistled-out stripped-dean discourse in spite of you,

i.angels of the university,

it’s stuff that doesn’t ever get purged from its his-

Lhimself and gets glopped together at the bottom where barred is the signifier that is the ferodous

pleader of the world.]

In Pasque, the signified is disturbed (see espedally Turbato 6 il significato, p. 18). Semantically, therefore, the text is centrifugal. But its stories of easters and teachings converge toward a common theme of the possibility of meaning in spite of the problems of the signified (—e l’insegnamento mutuo di tutto a tutto— [and the mutual teaching of everything to everything], p. 44; Qui tra discente e docente il divario si condude, tra chi guidi e chi segua [here the gap is closed between student and teacher, between the one who leads and the one who follows], p. 31). Thematically, then, the text is centripetal. Therefore, semantics and thematics pull against each other in a tension always related to the notion of a center.

The joke of Pasque is its inability to dedde whether utterances are xenoglossic (meaningful in a foreign code) or glossolalic (unencoded, meaningless tongues). For pedagogical reasons, it opts for xeno- glossy in order to conserve the possibility of meaning even if meaning is not immediately understood. And this option leads to a vital erotid- zation of pedagogy, where insegnami [teach me, mark me] (p. 43) is, in all senses, an invitation. This most Lacanian of all of Zanzotto’s books is thus also the most Zanzottan of all possible renditions of Lacan’s linguistic notions of the subject: out of the empty tomb comes a troubled sign which hints at meaning and allows us to teach (or seduce) one another and thus to come to an ontological sense of our selves through language.

IL GALATEO IN BOSCO [The woodland book of manners]

This woodland book of manners, published in 1978 as the first of a trilogy that also includes Fosfeni [Phosphenes] and Idioma [Idiom] seems to fulfill a prophecy found in Zanzotto’s first published book, Dietro il paesaggio [Behind the landscape]. In the Adunata [Assembled] poem of that first volume we read:

Ma, gloria avara del mondo, d’altre stagioni memoria deforme, resta la selva.¹⁰

e

[But, greedy glory of the world, deformed memory of other seasons, the wood remains.]

The wood remains here as the repository of histories that decay and are reborn in constant simultaneity with the present. In the Ga- lateo, the communicative reciprocation hinted at in the Pasque volume becomes more evident. Further, the notion of reciprocal communication loses its earlier tautological tinge as it expands to suggest the reciprocal creation of individual and group, the present and the past, cognition and memory, tradition and invention.

The strong metaphor here is the wood; the vehicle of the metaphor is the actual Montello wood near Zanzotto’s village in the Ve- neto. In the Montello, known for its ossuaries (memorials to the soldiers killed there in the Italian struggles against the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918) and its tourist-enticing sylvan charm, a casual trekker might easily turn up what Zanzotto calls a dear old tibia while walking along. The Montello is also the actual place where the sixteenth-century cultural theoretician, Giovanni della Casa, composed Europe’s first manual of manners, the Galateo. Further, the Montello’s Charterhouse, now gone, and the Abbey, now in ruins, were sites of much poetic activity from the sixteenth century until our own. Ossuaries and verses of other poetry mingle in Zanzotto’s images of sonnet-bones, and the book’s skeleton, so to speak, is a central hyper-sonnet in which fourteen perfect sonnets emblematize the twelve lines of a traditional sonnet, and the preface and postface, a traditional literary framing.

This woodland book of manners is also a guide to what Zanzotto calls the incredibly thin rules that maintain symbiosis and cohabitation, and the network of the symbolic, from language to gestures and perhaps even to perception itself: poised like spiderwebs or buried, veiled like filigrees above/within that boiling of presumptions which is reality.¹¹ But his metaphors of humus-simultaneity or the disappearance of historical chronology within an ecological model of con stant simultaneity vastly expand the Lacanian implications of the wood as the site of the symbolique. The Galateo in bosco glosses the combination of the linguistic determination of subjectivity and the relation of history to life that Benjamin, for example, sets forth in his essay on translation, where he writes, The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life.¹²

While any single poem from this book will only begin to suggest the sense of vitality this volume imparts, and while the selection we have made here only hints at the social implications of such a volume in the troubled year in which it appeared, the hopeful gist of the Galateo in bosco might be summed up in the nonetheless that appears in the final poem of the hyper-sonnet, Postilla [marginal note, gloss]. Here we find not only a clear-eyed view of language as both determinate and insufficient as far as subjectivity is concerned; we also find a praxis that puts all that in the margins, so to speak, and gets on with life:

Somma di sommi d’irrealtà, paese che a zero smotta e pur genera a vista vermi mutanti in dèi, così che acquista nel suo perdersi, e inventa e inforca imprese,

5 vanno da falso a falso tue contese, ma in sì variata ed infinita lista che quanto in falso qui s'intigna e intrista là col vero via guizza a nozze e intese.

Falso pur io, clone di tanto falso,

10 od aborto, e peggiore in ciò del padre, accalco detti in fatto ower misfatto:

così ancora di te mi sono avvalso, di te sonetto, righe infami e ladre— mandala in cui di frusto in frusto accatto.¹³

o

[Height of the heights of unreality, town

that crumbles to zero and nonetheless generates to

(.sight

worms changing to gods, so that you acquire as you lose yourself, and you invent and sit astride

[.undertakings,

5 your contentions pass from one falsehood to another, but in such a varied and infinite list that whatever stains and saddens itself with falsehood

ihere

slips off with truth to marriage and understandings

¡.there.

A falsehood even I, clone of so much falsehood,

10 or abortion, and worse in that than my father,

I throw sayings together in fact or rather misfact:

so I made use of you once more,

of you, sonnet, infamous, thieving lines—

mandala in which I go begging from one morsel to

i_another.]

FOSFENI

Approximately one year prior to the 1984 discovery in quantum mechanics of the so-called truth quark, the second of Zanzotto’s trilogy books appeared. The title of Fosfeni implies both the plankton incandescence that shines at night on the sea and the figures we perceive when we shut our eyes. If II galateo in bosco contains Zanzotto’s most cohesive discourse about history, Fosfeni is his most cohesive discourse about perception. The book opens with a characterization of language as a cozy, even exclusive, dinner-party, but it is a dinner like the Last Supper, or like many last suppers, and so we may assume that it announces some imminent change, some radical displacement, say, of the signifier, or perhaps an emphasis on its materiality. And the book closes with a poem about the logos, where reference and essence are balanced in an ambiguous future state that confuses precedence and result. The first poem suggests a theory of the cold that we find again at the end, when the last poem figures the logos as shining in ice crystals, even if logos is only an hypothesis. Within this philosophic-linguistic frame, the book’s attention repeatedly turns to notions of the possibility or impossibility of perception, whether it be of material or affective reality.

A key poem here is Vocabilite, fotoni [Vocability, photons], where we find a dramatic encounter between the I and Saint Lucy, who sacrificed her eyes for her faith. And a key image in this poem is the photon, the unit of light which exists simultaneously as particle and wave. By elaborating some of the notions of perception that Zanzotto has already presented in his early work, notably in the IX Ec- loghe, this poem resolves dilemmas of precedence and result that arise in the linguistic determination of subjectivity by a credo of simultaneity similar to the one regarding history in the earlier book, Il galateo in bosco. Here again, a blindness to the evident permits the perception of the essential (as in quark theory, it would seem):

Dispersa entro una vocabilità dolcissima

Eurosia, genio dei chicchi di grandine, dispersa ivi Barbara fotoricettiva delle radicolarità del fulmine

5 emerge ora Lùda dal terremotato

cristallo delle diafanità collinari Diva e niña del Freddo

forse con un certo sèguito di cupi pretuscoli

che m'invitano a pranzo, a mensa, a caldo rando 10 Ha in mano una scheggia di raggi

che forano qualsiasi ubiquità nell'altra mano i 9 gradi sottozero di lieve garza-neve, piuma d’uccello-già-neve,

15 Non può proteggere non può guidare

ma non sarà in secondi ordini giammai L'ustione le ha scorticato tanta parte del volto e fatto fumare via gli occhi —e non se ne sa più il percome il percosa—

20 Essa fu buio e viene dal buio del suo eccesso

tutta trinata di raggi in nome del AOrOS veniente e di tutti i freddi venturi ma ben schierati, schedabili in nevi, ma tutti pupilla e ricca lacrima d’attenzioni 25 ma in fregola di numeri e tracce

oh come s'infittisce il dialogo a soffi a spiscii

hints glimpses!

Lùda: né madre tu sei, né doni-in-tenebra o in cristallo, ma sei tu che aggiorni su quel che ti restava 30 alle spalle scarso dirupo d’anno,

svenimento giù giù di collina in collina svenimento sù sù per le celestialità Entro la riaffamata tagliola del freddo proprio davanti a te 35 d si dibatte e si ha voglia di rando

e di spicdar fuori sudar fuori dimettere zappettando, sì, di lasdar andare tutto, le stie vuote, spalancate È andato, niente rimpianto,

40 secchezze soltanto qua e là o brandelli,

carnicino nel selvatico dei palati— proprio nell'occhio il secco n

(voglia di numeri, del conto, al dopo-rando)

(Vien drìote adès anca la Lùzhia 45 pi granda e pi scarma de la só istessa imensa bontà)

Ammetti, diva Lùda, ai tuoi piedi—dove so io posati, così che ne sono ben deco di tutti i gradi della luce—

questa sbandante per forre—dove ben tu sai—

50 umile voglia di panegirico.

Rimbalzo di pianto agli occhi. Blow up di un solo fotone. fìM

e

[Dispersed within a sweetest vocability

Eurosia, hailstones’ genie,

dispersed therein Barbara, photoreceptor of lightning’s radicularities

5 Lùda now emerges from the earthquaked

crystal of the hill-bound diaphaneities Diva and niña of the Coldness

perhaps with a certain following of dour priestlings who invite me to